BLOG

IN THIS EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW, AMERICAN ARTIST CLAIRE L. EVANS DISCUSSES THE FUTURE OF VIDEO GAMES, THE FALSE DICHOTOMY BETWEEN GAMES AND REALITY, AND THE FRAMING POWER OF SCREENS.

Claire L. Evans is an American singer, writer, and artist based in Los Angeles, California. She is the lead singer of the pop duo YACHT. In addition, Evans is a science journalist, with a popular science and culture blog,Universe, hosted by National Geographic's Scienceblogs network. Her essay for Universe, "Moon Art: Fallen Astronaut" was anthologized in The Best Science Writing Online 2012. She is also the co-author of New Art/Science Affinities, a book about contemporary artists working at the intersection of science and technology, and the author of a collection of essays called High Frontiers, published by Publication Studio, a small press in Portland, Oregon. In August 2013, she became the editor-in-chief of OMNI Reboot, a new online version of the science magazine OMNI. Evans is the Futures Editor at Motherboard. Her book, The Future is Unmanned, a feminist history of the internet, is forthcoming from Penguin Random House.

This interview was produced by the students of Master's Degree Program in Arts, Markets and Cultural Heritage at IULM.

GVA: Why did you specifically choose a video game to make art? What do you find especially fascinating about this medium? Its interactivity? Agency? Aesthetics? Theatricality?

Claire Evans: I’m fascinated by the open ended nature of the sandbox game environment, how much it allows you to drift, to produce a dérive. I like to explore games, searching for the edges of the maps, the places where obstacles and “masking systems” (an industry term) politely turn the player away from the edges of a rendered environment. Sometimes I look for those same obstacles in the real world: what does the layout of a city permit its citizens to see? What is hidden through masking systems? Where does the map end? Only by pushing against the highly tactical, invisible force of a game narrative can the player discover its shape; only by seeking fences do we find our boundaries.

GVA: Digital games often create parallel, alternative experiences for its users. How do you relate to the complex relation between reality and simulation? How do you address this tension through your work?

Claire Evans: I try not to create explicit binaries between reality and simulation. The way I see it, artwork that hopes to make any kind of real impact needs to exist in both IRL and digital space; if it exists only in the “real” world, without documentation or some form of second life online, it might as well not exist, so limited is its potential reach. As the kids in America say, “pics or it didn’t happen.” But making work that is only online, or lives only inside of a game environment, is also lacking something important. One must always acknowledge the player, the kinesthetic or bodily experience, the physical hardware, the file. It’s best to create something that overlaps between several states of being. That’s how we all live now.

Claire L. Evans, Digital Decay: Meditation/Disintegration, 2011

"Animation of individual video frames saved in progressively lower file formats hundreds and hundreds of times. Where is the line at which compression ceases to preserve information entirely? The digital image washes away on the tide of its own preservation. The beach ball is the third eye."

GVA: How do video game aesthetics affect the overall impact of your work? What comes first, the concept or the medium?

Claire Evans: I’m far more interested in the physics of games than I am in gaming aesthetics. The weight of digital objects, how players and objects move through space, the built world of a generated reality, all made proprietary and disseminated through the landscape of game development—that’s fascinating territory. We are entering into a period of procedural generation: video game content generated algorithmically rather than manually. This means an essentially infinite universe of worlds can be explored by the player, all randomly generated from billions of possible configurations. The more sophisticated gaming mechanics become, the more we approach a one-to-one relationship with the complexity of actual reality. After procedural generation, I argue that we will see “Generative Reality.” The cause and effect of a game imbued with Generative Reality is as nuanced and manifold as anything that happens in the real world. It goes without saying that “Generative Reality” requires infinite bandwidth, a computer the size of a planet. It’s essentially a mystical conceit, but I consider it the endgame of gaming. We are already beginning to see it. The artist David O’Reilly has a game for PlayStation coming out soon, Everything, in which the player can control every visible object in the game world. Soon this will be our expectation for reality itself.

GVA: Why did you choose the first-person shooter Call of Duty: Modern Warfare to create your work?

Claire Evans: Modern Warfare is the documentation of an action taken within the infamous airport level of 2009’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. During this level, the player must assume the character of a deep cover CIA agent leading a group of gunmen to massacre passengers at Moscow’s Zakhaev International Airport. The level’s objective – to murder civilians – sparked a great deal of comment at the time of the game’s release; the far-right terrorist Anders Breivik would go on to cite the game as a form of “situational training’” for the 2011 Norway Attacks. In my action, the player instead systematically destroys every screen in the level: from the player POV, we see dozens of computers, displays, televisions, and monitors around the airport shatter under relentless gunfire. It’s an impossible object, kind of an ouroboros: the gamer, the “guy,” who is both the player and an avatar controlled by the player, attempts to annihilate the dead mirrors all around him, but he can’t escape the medium, only discover its boundaries, which define what he is.

GVA: Is the destruction of screens in a video games meant as a radical, iconoclastic gesture comparable, for instance, to the exhortations of burning down museums by the Futurists?

Claire Evans: I’m not sure. The difficult thing to define is where technology lives. We may feel constrained, limited, quantified and fundamentally alienated by social platforms like Facebook or technology corporations like Google, but if we are to “destroy” those spaces, where do we begin? Offices in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the intellectual capital lives? Or do we throw stones at a server farm somewhere in a hydropower-rich rural area, where the information is stored? At this point, any option feels like stomping on a mushroom, merely a symbolic victory. The intelligent network from which it sprouts, beneath the Earth, can survive anything; it lives forever because it’s life itself.